Web 2.0 Transforming Learning

Judy has kindly adjusted my permissions so I can display my blogroll, and I’m having another go at blogging. Whilst I remain excited about the prospect of being able to cast my pearls of wisdom before the whole world, I fear they may indeed trample them under their feet.

In spite of Judy’s best efforts, I still couldn’t establish a correspondence between the widgets I drag into the sidebar and the site view; in a moment of pique, I changed the theme of my blog to ‘anarchist’, and it seems to work better now - how surreal is that?

I spent most of yesterday trying to find the easiest way of sharing videos, and I’m still looking. The only video that is suitable (i.e. I created it, and nobody else that is in it is identifiable) is unacceptable to DivShare because it’s in the wrong format (mpeg4). So I spent some time investigating Quicktime export option, but wasn’t successful.

I did manage to successfully upload up a short clip for demonstration purposes (it’s a Pathe news bulletin about the raising of school leaving age in the 50s which has some resonances for today. However, I don’t own the copyright, and I have sought permission, so I’ll replace with something else as soon as I can  (on sballard.edublogs.org) (more…)

As with all teaching, the essence of a good lesson is in the preparation. I’ve just started using Comic Life, which is delightfully easy to use, but I jumped in without preparing the resources I needed to continue.

The learning objective I’d set for this exercise was to make a Comic Life page demonstrating how to use QuickTime to rotate a video through 90 degrees (I recently recorded some colleagues standing up, using the natty camera from the CLC; I rotated the camera to capture the full height of the colleagues, but when I came to play the video back, it was difficult to watch).

But I soon realised that my Comin Life task should have been to storyboard, and make sure I had all the images I needed beforehand.

Understanding how the use of ‘Web 2.0’ can strengthen teaching and learning and outcomes for children

Developing on line networks of professionals and hyper-links to disseminate effective and best practice in the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom

There are as many definitions as there are experts; the easiest way to start might be to compare a conventional encyclopaedia with Wikipedia

Wikipedia is highly dynamic, unindexed, of questionable authenticity and variable quality, is loosely moderated, is free at the point of use, and anyone with a point of view can contribute

(A chocolate orange for the best defintion in 100 words or less by the end of May)